Pharmacology

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the second leading cause of cancer-associated death worldwide, due to the difficulty in treating this cancer using conventional chemotherapeutic drugs such as doxorubicin, epirubicin, cisplatin, 5-fluorouracil or etoposide. A group in Asia believes this may be because medicines are not able to reach liver tumor cells in sufficient levels without harming to the rest of the body. They believe alternative drug treatment options that are able to target the tumor tissues, without inducing toxicity in other parts of the body, may be the solution, so Professor…

Some epidemiological papers have linked an increased risk of autism in children with women who took antidepressants during pregnancy. Suggestions have been that antidepressants or severe maternal depression cause autism. In a Molecular Psychiatry paper, investigators from Massachusetts General Hospital report that while a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder was more common in the children of mothers prescribed antidepressants during pregnancy than in those with no prenatal exposure, when the severity of the mother's depression was accounted for, that increased risk was no longer…

Alzheimer's disease can be slowed and some of its symptoms curbed by punicalagin, a natural compound, found in pomegranate, according to a  study in Molecular Nutrition and Food Research. Alzheimer's affects up to 44.4 million people globally.  The two-year project headed by University of Huddersfield scientist Dr. Olumayokun Olajide also found that the painful inflammation that accompanies illnesses such as rheumatoid arthritis and Parkinson's disease could be reduced. The punicalagin polyphenol can inhibit inflammation in specialized brain cells known as micrologia, according to…

By Mark Lawler, Queen's University Belfast Personalized medicine is the ability to tailor therapy to an individual patient so that, as it’s often put, the right treatment is given to the right patient at the right time. But just how personal is it? While the phrase might conjure up images of each patient getting their own individual therapeutic cocktail – this isn’t actually the case. Designing an individually tailored package would be too labour intensive and (at least currently) too expensive. Instead, the answer lies in understanding the genetics of patients and disease. Diseases are not (…

Ruxolitinib (trade name: Jakavi) has been approved since August 2012 for the treatment of adults with myelofibrosis. Myelofibrosis is a rare disease of the bone marrow, in which the bone marrow is replaced by connective tissue. As a consequence of this so-called fibrosis, the bone marrow is no longer able to produce enough blood cells. Sometimes the spleen or the liver takes over some of the blood production.  Then these organs enlarge and can cause abdominal discomfort and pain. The typical symptoms also include feeling of fullness, night sweats and itching. Some patients with…

The drug perampanel (trade name Fycompa) has been approved since July of 2012 as an adjunctive ("add-on") therapy for adults and children aged 12 years and older with seizures - colloquially also known as epileptic fits. In a new early benefit assessment, according to the Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products (AMNOG), the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) examined whether perampanel offers an added benefit over the appropriate comparator therapy. However, the added benefit couldn't be derived from the new dossier either, as the drug…

By Allison Jarrell, Inside Science For centuries, cinnamon has been used to enhance the flavor of foods, but new research shows that the spice could also help make foods safer. According to a study by Meijun Zhu and Lina Sheng, food safety scientists at Washington State University in Pullman, the ancient cooking spice could help prevent some of the most serious foodborne illnesses caused by pathogenic bacteria. Zhu and Sheng studied concentrated, or essential, oil extracted from the cassia variety of cinnamon – the most popular type for cooking in the United States. Cassia cinnamon has a…

A new study has found that carbon monoxide could be used to protect against life-threatening arrhythmias after a heart attack. Restoring blood flow to the heart following a heart attack can leave patients with ventricular fibrillation, a dangerous heart rhythm which puts people at greater risk of sudden cardiac death. Previous research has shown carbon monoxide, which is produced naturally in heart cells, can guard against ventricular fibrillation, however the mechanism behind why this happens was unknown. Scientists at Aston University in Birmingham (UK) and Peking University in China have…

Women with a vitamin D deficiency were nearly half as likely to conceive through in vitro fertilization (IVF) as women who had sufficient levels of the vitamin, according to a new study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology&Metabolism. Long known for its role in bone health, vitamin D is a steroid hormone that is emerging as a factor in fertility. Animal studies have shown that the hormone, which is produced in the skin as a result of sun exposure as well as absorbed from some fortified foods, affects fertility in many mammals. To examine vitamin D in human fertility, Italian…

 Chloroquine is a well-known medicine with a good safety profile that has been in use since World War 2 for the treatment of malaria and certain auto-immune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis. More recently, chloroquine has been studied as an anti-cancer treatment because chloroquine blocks autophagy, a process that cancer cells use to survive to anti-cancer treatments. Blocking autophagy would reduce the resistance of the cancer cells to chemotherapy. A recent study found that chloroquine also normalizes the abnormal blood vessels in tumors. This blood vessel normalization…